


October 23rd - Welcome to Gay Hockey Hell

by omgericzimmermann (HMSLusitania)



Series: 13 Days of Halloween [5]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: 13 Days of Halloween, M/M, demon!dex, foolish man, nursey spoke latin in front of the books, welcome to gay hockey - wow the hell is way more literal than i thought
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-22 04:30:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8272895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HMSLusitania/pseuds/omgericzimmermann
Summary: Derek was just trying to make it through class. He just spoke Latin in front of the books. He - he didn't bargain on a demon appearing. Day 5 of 13 Days of Halloween





	

“’Don’t speak Latin in front of the books Derek’,” Derek grumbles to himself, carrying the stack of old books back towards the distribution venue. “What is this? _Buffy_?”

He places the books gently on the conveyor belt and goes to leave the library. He’s not sure how he’s supposed to get through his medieval lit class without speaking Latin in front of the books. His Latin is terrible and it helps to read it out loud in a French accent because then he can sort of almost figure out what it means without too much effort. But no. Larissa had just about smacked the book out of his hand when he started reading it.

“It’s not like it even says anything,” Derek mutters, picking the book back up from the conveyor belt before it can disappear into the bowels of the library. “It’s not like I’m decoding the frickin’ Voynich.”

He rolls  his eyes and opens back to the page he’d been looking at.

“ _Ad ligandum eos pariter eos coram me_ ,” he reads. Predictably, nothing happens. Because Latin is not some magical language that has any extra power over the physical universe. That would just be stupid.

He puts the book back on the conveyor belt and turns to leave the library. But there’s a man in the way.

He’s tall like Derek, with flame red hair that seems to crackle with actual fire. His eyes burn as well, flickering between red and orange and gold. And so, like, Derek’s seen some shit when he dropped acid with Shitty that one time, but this is something new.

“Um,” is the only thing that comes out of Derek’s mouth before fire guy raises his eyebrow.

“You called?” fire guy asks.

“I – I did?” Derek asks.

Then he realises. He _spoke Latin in front of the books._

Shit.

“Look, pal, I drew the short straw and got sent up, so what do you want?” fire guy asks.

“Um,” Derek says, because he can’t think of what else to say. “Nah, man it’s chill I don’t want anything.”

Fire guy raises his eyebrow again. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve just gotta – I’m gonna go,” Derek says.

Derek turns and runs from the library. With some absent part of his brain, he hopes that the fire guy won’t accidentally – or intentionally – light the building on fire. He doesn’t stop to investigate and keeps running until he gets back to his apartment.

“What the fuck,” he breathes as soon as the door is closed and locked behind him.

He lives alone, which is one of the benefits of having rich parents who feel guilty about the fact they never call. He likes his apartment. He’s got a bedroom and then the main room, and a black cat that sort of adopted him at some point.

So when he hears a clank from the bathroom, he assumes it’s his cat. That is, until she wraps herself around his ankles and mews for dinner.

Derek freezes, then picks up his hockey stick. He approaches the bathroom slowly and right when he goes to open the door, it swings inwards to reveal the fire guy. Derek screams. Fire guy looks unimpressed.

“Look, asshole,” fire guy says. “You summoned me. You’ve got to suck it up and deal with the consequences.”

“What consequences?” Derek demands. “I didn’t summon anything!”

“You read a Latin incantation out of a book,” fire guy says. “You summoned a demon from hell, so now we can trade, or whatever.”

Part of his brain is convinced that Derek is hallucinating again. The other parts are shrieking in a surprisingly harmonious chorus.

“Hell’s not real,” Derek says instead, backing into his kitchen. His cat meows and then trots over to the fire guy, winding around his ankles and butting her head on his calf. Fire guy looks surprised then leans down to stroke her. Derek can hear the little traitor purring from the other side of the kitchen.

“Are you sure there’s not something you want? Something you’d trade your soul for?” the fire guy asks. “I’ve got a quota to fill.”

Derek stares at him. “Do I get any time to think about it?”

Fire guy shrugs, picks up Derek’s cat, and flops onto Derek’s couch. He grabs the remote and flicks on the TV and settles right in, like there’s no chance he’s going anywhere. Derek isn’t proud of it, but he hides in his room. Sometime around five in the morning he passes out from exhaustion. To his dismay, fire guy is still there when he gets up, Derek’s cat snoozing on his chest.

“Why are you still here?” Derek asks.

“Dude, you summoned me,” fire guy says. “I can’t go until we make a deal. So what do you want? You’re artistic or something right? You could trade your soul for unlimited success in your artistic endeavours.”

“What’s the catch?” Derek asks.

“I take your soul,” fire guy says. “And like, come to collect in 10 years.”

“Ten years of unlimited artistic success? That’s all you’ve got?” Derek asks, and then he runs out of the apartment. He’s not quite to the point of being late, but he’s nearly there.

He doesn’t tell Larissa about the fire guy in his apartment or his traitorous cat. He doesn’t even know what he’d say. The most reasonable solution he’s come up with is to just ignore it and hope it goes away.

It stops being reasonable when he gets home and fire guy is definitely still there, and he’s drinking Derek’s beer and giving him a deeply suspicious look.

“What,” Derek says, too annoyed to frame it as a question.

“Your sink leaks,” fire guy says. “Well. Leaked. I fixed it.”

“Thanks,” Derek grumbles, pulling his own beer out of the fridge.

“Also your beer is terrible,” fire guy says.

“There’s nothing wrong with PBR,” Derek protests.

“It is actual piss water,” fire guy informs him. “And your shower’s not supposed to make that noise when you turn it on.”

Derek stares at him. “It’s not?”

“No,” fire guy says. “I can fix it if you want.”

Derek eyes him warily. He’s not about to sell his soul to fix his shower.

“You can’t have my soul to fix my shower,” he says.

Fire guy rolls his eyes. “I owned a repair shop,” he says. “When I was human. It’s nice to use human skills every once in a while.”

And then he turns for the bathroom to fix Derek’s apparently malfunctioning shower.

Derek is thoroughly creeped out when he gets to class the next day and sits next to Larissa. She notices, but her only response is to raise her eyebrow slowly until he crumbles.

“Iaccidentallyspokelatininfrontofthebooksinthelibraryandsummonedademonfromhell,” Derek says in a rush.

“Say that again?” Larissa requests.

“I accidentally spoke Latin in front of the books in the library and summoned a demon from hell,” Derek repeats in a much calmer tone than he feels. “And he keeps fixing my things and bought me beer that’s not PBR.”

Larissa stares at him for a very long time.

“Is he hot?” she asks finally.

“He is a literal demon from Hell,” Derek replies. Larissa shrugs as if to say she’s heard worse.

 

The demon is still there when Derek gets back to his apartment. He’s eating Derek’s Cheetos and feeding them to his cat every so often. The little traitor is happy as a clam about this.

“Why are you still here?” Derek demands, opening the freezer and grabbing a bottle of vodka. Fire guy eyes it curiously.

“We haven’t made a deal yet,” he says. “I’m here until we make a deal.”

Derek groans in frustration, grabs the vermouth off the top of his fridge, and the martini shaker out of his cabinet. He doesn’t have green olives, so he settles for black, and starts to shake it until the demon comes into his kitchen and slowly places a hand on Derek’s martini shaker to stop him. His orange eyes are wide and earnest and Derek wants to run away, except that Larissa’s question was spot on because yeah, the demon is really hot.

“I know this is going to sound ironic coming from someone who is literally a demon, but you just committed a blasphemy I cannot let stand,” he says, taking the shaker and pouring its contents into Derek’s sink.

“What did I do?” Derek asks.

“You used sweet vermouth, flavoured vodka, and black olives that you put _in the shaker_ ,” the demon scolds, riffling through Derek’s cabinets and somehow producing ingredients Derek hadn’t been aware of having. He watches in curiosity while the demon adds gin (where the hell did he get gin? But maybe that’s the answer in and of itself) and then a splash of vermouth and some ice, shakes it up, and strains it into two glasses before garnishing with green olives.

“But gin doesn’t come in flavours,” Derek says, eying this new martini suspiciously.

The demon stares at him so hard that his irises turn to actual embers. Derek winces and backs away.

“Okay firstly – it does come in flavours. It comes in gin flavour. And secondly, who the fuck uses flavoured vodka for a martini?” the demon demands, taking a sip of his drink from the perspiring glass. Derek is too ashamed to answer and takes a drink of his own. It’s probably the best martini he’s ever consumed.

“Holy fuck I know you said you owned a repair shop in your human life, but did you ever bartend?” Derek demands.

The demon sighs. “I did a lot of things,” he says. “Including go to college in a conservative state while gay.”

Derek blinks. Despite the fact there’s been a literal demon in his house for a while, he’s been ignoring the implications as far as Judeo-Christian ideology are concerned. And if his demon ( _the_ demon, he mentally corrects) is a demon from hell because he was gay, then, well. Well Derek has got a very grim look at his future.

“You – you went to hell because you were gay?” Derek asks.

The demon snorts. “Fuck no,” he says. “I straight up murdered my older brother.”

“Oh! Okay,” Derek says, because that seems like a way better reason to go to hell. And he realises as he’s saying the words that it is not the time to make a word choice pun, but he can’t stop himself so he commits. “Can’t have been _that_ straight.”

The demon stares at him for a second, and then bursts out laughing.

“What was your name?” Derek asks, because he’s hanging out in his kitchen drinking martinis with a demon that once killed his own brother so what does he really have to lose.

“Will,” the demon says. “It was Will.”

 

Will tells Derek all about his life growing up in Maine in the seventies, about his older siblings including the homophobic racist asshole older brother he murdered. He tells him how much he liked fixing things and has always sort of regretted the fact he died in his early twenties, because he could’ve done a lot.

“How did you die?” Derek asks, hoping it’s not a rude question.

“Oh, the asshole brother shot me before I pushed him into the wood chipper,” Will says.

“Oh,” Derek says with an attempt at a casual he doesn’t feel. “You still wound up in Hell though?”

“Well, I mean, I did push him into the chipper,” Will says. “But because he was a homophobic waste of space, he’s actually burning in Hell. My particular brand of premediated revenge murder for good reason got me stuck in Hell but at least I get to be a demon.”

“And that’s better?” Derek asks.

“Oh yeah, way better,” Will agrees.

Derek can accept this, and when he finally heads off to sleep that night he doesn’t worry about the fact there’s a demon crashing on his couch.

 

The next few days are hectic. Derek has finals, and he’s cramming term papers, and he’s pretty sure he bleeds caffeine at this point, but there’s nothing he can do about that. Will starts making food for him, which is the sweetest thing Derek has ever had done to him. He also stops trying to get Derek to make deals. Derek doesn’t know what to make of that.

By the time Derek’s finished his finals, and winter break is upon them, Will hasn’t actually left. Half the time he even seems normal, like an average twenty-something. And then he’ll burst into flame and take things out of the cupboards that Derek knows he didn’t own previously.

“I missed ice skating so much,” Will says when Derek comes home one afternoon from his part time job at the coffee shop down the street, Annie’s.

“You went ice skating?” Derek asks.

“Yeah I used to play hockey,” Will says.

“What position did you play?” Derek asks.

“Defence,” Will says. “Did you play?”

“Yeah, defence,” Derek says, laughing. Will smiles. He has a great smile, sort of bashful and bright and just…pretty.

“I dated my partner,” Will says, sitting down on Derek’s couch. “That’s how my brother found out.”

“I did too,” Derek says, sitting down next to Will. “And then he graduated and moved to Seattle because he got drafted to the NHL.”

“I can’t even imagine living like that,” Will says, shaking his head.

“Well it’s not like you’re going anywhere right?” Derek says. “If I don’t make a deal?”

Will gives him a sad smile. “Someday someone else is gonna summon me,” he says.

Derek considers. He doesn’t want anyone else to summon Will. He wants Will to stay there with him.

“What if--”

He stops himself and shakes his head. It’s a crazy idea.

“What?” Will asks.

“What if our deal was that in exchange for my soul, you got to stay here on earth as if you were human,” Derek suggests.

Will stares at himself, his eyes wide. “You’d really do that?”

Derek shrugs. “I kinda like having you around.”

“You do?” Will asks.

Derek nods.

“You know that people who give their souls to a demon end up in Hell, right?” Will says. “Regardless of what good they’ve done.”

Derek shrugs again. “Yeah, but for something this nice, at least I’ll get to be a demon myself, right?”

“Yeah,” Will agrees. “Yeah definitely.”

His eyes light up – bursting into flame – and he smiles at Derek. “You really want to do that? Trade your soul for a second shot at my life?”

“Well, on one condition,” Derek says. An adorable furrow appears in Will’s brow. “You have to stay with me.”

Will’s face softened and he scooped up Derek’s cat. “I can do that.”

“Good,” Derek said, and he leans across the couch and kisses Will. To his great relief, Will kisses him back, and Derek’s not sure, but he thinks that might have officially sealed the deal.

**Author's Note:**

> General Housekeeping/ ~~Hauskeeping???~~  
>  Thanks for participating in the 13 Days of Halloween! We're almost halfway there!


End file.
